TlatoSMD:
>>>>>Ah yes, that translator... It was almost like he was the one giving the interview.
Hm? Please tell me what you mean. Naturally I have no idea what he was saying or how he was saying it.
>>>>>on what level did it escape Unca Carl's grasp? Logical, as in that he really didn't understand it? Moral, as in that he thought it was just not right to mess with the past in such a way? Or did he say it was physically impossible to achieve?
First, let me put you in the right frame of mind. My father, for example, never read a comic book or even comic strip in his entire life. Never! For entertainment he only watched TV. Never even read a book. (My whole life seems to be a subconcious rebellion against what boring, uninteresting people my parents were.) Now, do you realize how reading a comic story is a totally different LANGUAGE that you need to learn? We all learned it gradually from birth. But imagine what it would be like trying to understand a comic as an adult, particularly an aged adult, if you don't already know the "language" of reading comics!
My father never wanted me to even read comics when I was a kid -- it was a childish waste of time to him. Or... perhaps he didn't want me to learn things he did not understand. When I eventually began creating comics for a living, he wanted to see them, so I gave him copies of my stories.
He could not understand them. He was used to watching TV... a continuous narrative. A comic book requires IMAGINATION. You must IMAGINE what happens between each panel, IMAGINE what happens between scenes, maybe a dozen times per page, hundreds of times in each story. This seems preposterously simple to us, but that's because we KNOW how to use our imagination to fill in these gaps. Trying to explain to my father how to read a comic would be like trying to describe a color to a blind man.
Barks knew how to read comics (!), but the Zane Gray pulps and silent movies he grew up on did not feature the concept of someone physically travelling in time. I sent him (as I was doing before the so-called "Barks Studio" gained control) prepublication copies of all my stories. I sent him my "Of Duck and Dimes and Destinies" where Magica travels back in time to see $crooge as a child to steal his #1 Dime. Mr. Barks could not make sense of it. As I recall, he couldn't understand why, when Magica first met $crooge in her first appearance, she didn't already know of this time travel trip she took. After all, it had happened in the past, so she should know that it happened. But we know she had not yet taken the trip to the past. But if it was in the past, she'd remember it ever since she was born. See? It was some sort of thing like that. He simply could not conceive of the idea of someone traveling from the future into the past and back again. Time travel to him was like reading comics was to my father, or like the concept of color (or sight) is to a blind man.
Try to wrap your brain around that.
>>>>>Also, what about Back to long ago?
Haven't you read that story yourself? There is no time travel. No one travels physically back in time. $crooge is simply hypnotized into visualizing a scene that supposedly happened in the past. But it was a mental image, that's all.